Moments ago, ahead of the 30-day deadline he set on Jan. 14, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced his plan to fix the “drum major” quote on the side of the Martin Luther King Memorial's Stone of Hope. It will, he says, contain the entire quotation originally selected by the Council of Historians of the Memorial Foundation:

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.

When the monument was unveiled, the quote had been truncated, without National Park Service approval, to “I was a drum major for justice, peace and rightenousness.” This newspaper, along with Martin Luther King III, Maya Angelou and Stephen Colbert, among others, had argued that the abbreviation sounded boastful, exactly opposite of what King intended. His lesson had been: Do not be boastful; do not seek to be the drum major getting the credit, at the front of the line. But if he was going to be praised, at least let it be in a just cause.

“It's the right thing to do, just because it's a monument that's so important for our nation, and it's important that we get it right,” Salazar told the Post.

Rick Santorum isn’t the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. He’s the conservative alternative to reality. He consistently mistakes belief for truth — and even fiction for fact.

On abortion, belief becomes truth: He regularly insists that the notion that life begins at conception is a “biological fact” he “knows” to be true, which is insulting to anyone who has struggled with his or her beliefs on what is fundamentally a matter of faith, not biology.

Now, on climate change, he’s substituting fiction for fact. Santorum insisted in a Thursday speech — and he reprised this theme on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference — that conservatives aren’t anti-science, they’re “the truth party.” What’s the “truth,” then, on climate science? A bizarre, conspiratorial narrative about liberals, climate experts, environmentalists and other right-wing boogiemen, all of whom, Santorum said, are “trying to make you feel guilty so you’ll give them power so they can lord it over you.”

“This was a politicization of science....The absurdity and the politicization and the manipulation of data. Why? Because the left is always looking for a way to control you.”

Yes, Rick. That’s the only way the experts, journalists and politicians familiar with the accumulated evidence of global warming could possibly take it seriously. What about those of us who don’t identify with the hard left, who could care less about lording power over others and, yet, somehow, still favor doing something about climate change — even after looking carefully at all the “manipulated” data? To Santorum, we apparently don’t exist, or are too stupid to recognize the “truth” that thousands of people across dozens of countries, including the National Academies of Science, have coordinated an intricate plot over the course of decades that has ensnared Democrats and Republicans alike.

President Obama did today what he should have done at the very beginning: He honored the fact that religious groups, including the Catholic Church, had legitimate religious liberty claims in the battle over a contraception mandate under the new health care law. And he did so while still holding to his commitment to expanding contraception coverage as broadly as possible.

Substantively, both sides of this controversy ought to take some satisfaction from the outcome. From the Church’s point of view, Obama has allayed its concerns that its allied organizations would be required to cover contraception, in violation of the Church’s teachings. Yet those who worried that employees of Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies would not be able to access contraception coverage should be happy, too.

Following but tweaking a model pioneered by Hawaii, the administration lifted the requirement that objecting religious organizations had to pay for contraception themselves. The health care policies they issue will not have to include contraception. Moreover, responding to another Catholic concern, they will also be under no obligation to inform their employees that they can receive contraception coverage in other ways or refer them to such coverage.

Instead, the requirement to inform will rest with the insurance companies who will be required to provide such coverage free of charge if individual employees ask for it. Since contraception coverage in effect saves insurance companies money (covering contraception is cheaper than covering pregnancy and child birth), the insurance companies will be required to offer this coverage free of charge. Under Obama’s proposal, responsibility for asking for contraception coverage falls to individuals.

The most important Catholic service providers quickly welcomed Obama’s move. “We are pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protection needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appreciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accomplished,” the Catholic Health Association said in a statement issued after Obama’s announcement.

There’s been a lot of rooting this week. The American people are rooting a little bit more for President Obama. His approval rating is 50 percent in The Post poll and 49 percent in the Gallup poll. In both, those are the highest for Obama in quite a while. The Ninth Circuit rooted for same-sex marriage in a narrow ruling declaring a California ban on such unions unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Karl Rove took rooting against America to new heights by condemning a car commercial that tapped into our innermost belief in ourselves as a nation. Conservatives again rooted against Mitt Romney, this time in three states. But they did root for Rick Santorum. And with CPAC in town, they’re all rooting against President Obama.

When it comes to the p-Op quiz, I’m always rooting for you. So, get crackin’.

The Obama administration’s current policy toward Syria might be described as the Big Bad Wolf approach. The president and secretary of state huff and puff — loudly denouncing Bashar al Assad and predicting the fall of his regime — and hope it reacts like a house of straw.

“The Syrian regime’s policy of maintaining power by terrorizing its people only indicates its inherent weakness and inevitable collapse,” said a statement issued by Obama last Saturday. “Assad’s fall is inevitable.  It’s clear his regime is no longer in full control of the country and only continues to take Syria toward adangerous end,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told my colleague David Ignatius ten days ago.

But what if Assad’s defenses — including the tanks and artillery of his Republican Guard and elite Fourth Armored division — are made of brick? That’s what it’s beginning to look like this week as the regime pounds rebel-held neighborhoods in the city of Homs, killing hundreds a day. The rebel Free Syrian Army — a hodgepodge of neighborhood militias and defected soldiers armed with light weapons — seems to lack the capacity to stand up to such an assault, much less defeat it.

The onslaught in Homs, along with the veto by Russia and China of a United Nations Security Council resolution last weekend, have prompted Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) to propose that the United States and its allies begin actively aiding the Syrian opposition, including with weapons. The White House and State Department demur: “We don’t think more arms into Syria is the answer,” said State.

To which McCain tweeted Thursday: “Tell that to the Iranians and Russians.” Both have provided materiel aid to Assad’s forces.

The administration’s theory seems to be that Assad’s army will soon be exhausted by defections and the impossibility of suppressing opposition across the country. Its generals — maybe after listening to Washington’s predictions? — will turn on Assad, depose him, and then accept the Arab League’s plan for a democratic transition.

Yet Assad’s top generals, like him, are members of the minority Alawite clan; the commander of the Fourth Division is his brother, Maher. These men may feel they have nowhere to go in a country and a region where Sunni Islamists are in the ascendancy, and no choice but to fight to the bitter end. Not possible? Ask their enemies in Lebanon, the Maronite Christians, who played out a losing hand for 14 years of civil war in the 1970s and 80s.

Either an Assad victory or a long war would be a disaster for the United States and its allies; a speedy collapse of the regime would be a devastating blow to Iran, for which Syria is a crucial ally. It follows that the best U.S. policy — in what is, at best, a bad and risky situation — is to follow McCain’s advice. This could be easily done through proxies: Persian Gulf states, and possibly Turkey, are already providing aid and probably arms to the Free Syrian Army.

A senior European diplomat I spoke with today shuddered at this prospect: The EU, like the State Department, favors forming a “Friends of Syria” group with the Arab League that would do...well, it’s not yet clear. But the diplomat said an arm-the-opposition policy would trigger unforseeable blowback — another Afghanistan.

That’s a misreading of history. In fact, arming the Afghan opposition in the 1980s succeeded in its aim of driving out the Soviet Union. U.S. responsibility for the subsequent chaos lay in its abandonment of the country after 1989, not the arms it gave the mujahadeen.

In this case, the United States has reason to provide material support for the Syrian opposition precisely so it can be a player in Syria if and when Assad does fall. Western influence could be vital in shaping the post-Assad regime. Or would it be better to stand back while Saudi and Qatari fundamentalists ship weapons to their counterparts in Syria — and call the political shots afterward?